Obscured View

I read this great review from a British reviewer regarding Transformers 2:

“…and nothing happens very loudly about a hundred times.”

This is exactly how I feel about Killzone 2.  I don’t think I’ve ever been more indifferent to a game than this one.  It’s got a really nice (although mostly brown) visual style, decently responsive controls, the always required dramatic and expensive intro movie… and the only thing I could think while playing it is…

meh.

It’s like they’re trying really, really hard to make this an involving game, and just missed the mark.  I really just didn’t care at all about the plight of the troop your character is in.  There’s the typical assortment of bad-ass marines, the retired marine that’s now a commander, a grumpy sergeant, a sci-branch woman who feeds you info… sound familiar?

I think the lack of intriguing mission setups hurts KZ2 a lot.  You’re just dropped into things with very little view into the big picture of the war.  It feels like I’m doing very mundane things rather than amazingly epic ones, but a lot of that is because of the lead-in cinematics, which just try way too hard to be cool and edgy.  I mean 90% of FPS games these days have missions like KZ2 has — escort the convoy, take out the AA gun, destroy the comm link, etc.  This game has all the right components, but it’s just so…

meh.

Now that said, the game does pick up the pace as it goes along.  Combats get more interesting, with more enemies, better combat environments, and more interesting new weapons to play with.  There’s also one really good moment involving a ship falling out of orbit.  It’s the only cut-scene of the game I didn’t at least once consider skipping outright.

But in a $60 game that’s supposed to offer a lot of value, it comes up short if you’re the co-op and single player type gamer.